It is Monday Morning again and that means it is time for you to learn about stuff you may not care about. I say that because I received a nice email from someone telling me that they don’t care about drifting and I should focus more on LeMans and GT racing. So to start things of this morning we will first talk about…….
………DRIFTING!!
Round 1 of the 2011 Formula D season has come and gone. It was a pretty eventful weekend in Long Beach with the failure of a couple of the big boys not qualifying while one of the the ‘little’ guys almost stole the whole show.
Alex Lee from Calgary made his Formula D debut in his Toyota Cresta. After getting his car put together just a few days before leaving for California, Alex managed to place 34th out of 44 drivers during qualification resulting in him just missing the Top 32 and the tandem elimination brackets that followed. Looking at the big picture though it sounds like Alex attracted the attention of several and was last known to be involved in a photo-shoot last night in Downtown LA.
I mentioned that a couple of the big name drivers didn’t qualify. Sam Hubinette’s Dodge Challenger didn’t even make it out of the paddock on Friday due to mechanical issues and probably the biggest shock was the 2010 champion Vaughn Gitten JR just missing out placing 33rd in qualifying.
Matt Powers probably made the biggest splash this weekend powering his way through the elimination rounds only to finally make a mistake on the last run of the day and let Justin Pawlik open up a big enough gap to give him the edge. Matt was criticized quite a bit when he told everyone he was going with a LS V8 this year. I think it is safe to say that the critics were silenced. Looking at the Top 8, five of the cars had V8’s and all four in the ‘Final 4’.
The final podium looked like this:
1st Justin Pawlik
2nd Matt Powers
3rd Dai Yoshihara
Next up on the Formula D circuit is Road Atlanta on May 6th and 7th. Backwards entries anyone?
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Round 2 of the Formula One schedule took place in Malaysia yesterday and Like Australia a couple of weeks earlier, Sebastien Vettel qualified in the pole position and finished the race first. Jenson Button was second and Nick Heidfeld was 22 seconds further back for 3rd. It is a quick turnaround as the next round is this weekend in China.
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I watched a little of the IndyCar race which took place in Alabama yesterday. I was interested to hear that there was a new Canadian that was making his first appearance on the grid. James Hinchcliffe from the Toronto area drove for the well known Newman/Haas Racing team. Unfortunately he didn’t finish the race. Otherwise the podium looked like this:
1st Will Power
2nd Scott Dixon
3rd Dario Franchitti
Next up is Long Beach this upcoming weekend.
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Round 2 of the Global RallyCross Championship takes place in Washington State this weekend. There will be a couple of new cars from Europe taking part this weekend. One of those cars being a former championship winning Ford Focus in the European series.
Marcus Gronholm won’t be driving this weekend due to personal commitments so the car owner Olsberg MSE will be using one of their own crew members to pilot the Best Buy Ford Fiesta.
The event is taking place on the DirtFish Rally School grounds in Snoqualmie, Washington. Apparently part of the course takes the cars indoors through a warehouse. Should be interesting.
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Round 4 of the WRC tours stops in Jordan this week. There was some concern a few weeks back about the conflict in Middle Eastern countries but it looks like they have it all figured out and the event will run from Thursday to Saturday.
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And to finish things off this Monday I have something that shows you why roll cages are important:
I feel so much smarter after watching this video.
Go Alex.
well… he almost made the flip…almost